Sarah Durst - The Lost

“I have. I mean, I will.” I feel myself flushing red. “Mom, are you trying to set us up?”

“I’m compressing three months of mothering into three minutes,” she says. “Now, give your phone number to the nice doctor, sit up straight, and don’t let your mouth gape open. You’ll catch flies that way, and while they are high on protein, it’s not attractive in front of a potential mate.”

I am blushing furiously now. “You’re right,” I say to Dr. Barrett. “She is extraordinary.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Lauren.” Mom snaps her fingers. “Hand me a pen, William.”

Bemused, the doctor obeys. Mom scrawls on a napkin on the side of her lunch tray. I notice that she’s barely touched the food. I also notice that her hand is shaking as she writes. Her hands were always so steady. A few months ago, she could thread the tiniest needle in a half-lit room and then sew a button without even looking at it, much less piercing herself. If I attempted that, I’d bleed all over the button. She shoves the napkin at him. “Now give us some privacy, and call my daughter later.”

Wordlessly, he accepts the napkin. I suppose they didn’t cover this in medical school.

“You really don’t have to,” I tell him.

“I’d never dream of disobeying your mother.” He tucks the napkin into his clipboard, and then he leaves. Mom is chuckling. She then sobers and looks at me.

“Have a nice nap?” she asks.

“Tolerable,” I say. “Weird dreams, though. And terrible morning breath.”

“Don’t scare me like that again. Whole upside of cancer is supposed to be that there’s no chance that your children die first.” She looks at me as if expecting me to tell her not to talk like that, to tell her she’s not going to die. But I don’t say anything. Softly, she says, “I really look that bad.”

I don’t want to answer that, neither with a lie nor with the truth. “Want me to tell you about my weird dream?”

“Does it have someone attractive of the male persuasion?” she asks.

“Yes,” I say. “Yes, it does.”

She folds her hands across her chest. “Then I’m listening.”

I tell her everything.

Mom doesn’t interrupt once. She listens to every detail and then after I finish, she contemplates me. I watch the display on the heart monitor. The line jolts in rhythm to the beeps.

“You disappoint me, Lauren. Three months of dreaming about a hot, half-nude wild man, and you only kissed?” Mom clucks her tongue. “Or are you sanitizing the story for your mother’s ears? On second thought, don’t tell me. I don’t want the mental picture in my head.”

“He slept in my closet most of the time.”

“That wasn’t a metaphor, was it?”

“Nope. Literally in my closet. To protect me.”

“From dangerous hangers?”

“From attackers. I think he planned to surprise them.”

She coughs, and I have to grip the sides of my chair to keep myself from going to her. Her entire body quakes from the coughs as if every muscle were spasming. When it subsides, she continues as if nothing happened, “A conventional guard would guard the doorway and stop the attacker before he enters the room.”

I make myself smile. Her logic is sound, of course. “Peter was anything but conventional.”

She squints hard at me. “Now, Lauren, don’t you fall for an imaginary boyfriend after I went through all the trouble of getting sick in order to find you a nice, handsome doctor to marry.”

“Aha, I knew there was an explanation for all of this.”

“Take it from me, imaginary boyfriends will only break your heart.” Her smile fades, and her eyes flutter closed. I listen again to the beep-beep of her monitor. I used to hate that sound, but today I find it soothing. She’s still here, it says. I lean my head back on the chair. My limbs feel heavy, and they throb. I know I should try to pee, but I don’t think I can face the burning. I ignore it. Her breathing is slow and even, and I think she’s fallen asleep. But then her eyes flutter open. She turns her head to look at me. “Oh, good. You’re still here. Unless I’m hallucinating?”

I pry myself off the chair and try not to wince. Shuffling the few steps to the bed, I take her hand in mine. It feels so fragile, like holding a baby bird. “Real.”

Her fingers close around my hand. “You should rest.”

“I can rest here.” I point to the chair. “It reclines. Besides, it’s not like there aren’t doctors and nurses on this floor, too. In fact, they’re kind of in abundance. I’ll stay until they kick me out.”

Mom pats the bed next to her. “Come on, Laurie-kitten. Let me hug you.”

It’s the nickname that gets me. She hasn’t called me that in years. I feel my eyes heat, and to hide that, I sit on the edge of the bed. It takes some maneuvering to squeeze me in beside her without disturbing any of her wires or tubes. Some get caught in my hair, and we laugh as we untangle them, occasionally setting off the IV alarm. It’s either laugh or cry, I realize. After a while, though, I manage it. We lie side by side on our backs. I’m panting from the effort of climbing onto the bed with limbs that haven’t worked much in three months. She’s breathing shallowly, too, and I wonder if this was a good idea. But then she slides her hand into mine, and she sighs softly and it’s all okay.

“Tell me what I don’t know about you,” I say.

She’s silent for so long that I think she must have fallen asleep again or not heard me or both. I think about repeating the question, but if she is asleep, I don’t want to wake her.

“You’ve finally accepted this,” she says softly.

I don’t answer.

“Really was some dream you had.”

“Really was,” I agree. “Funny thing is, I keep feeling guilty because I promised to go back.”

She squeezes my hand. “Please, don’t go back. I don’t want you in a coma again. Stay in this world. Please stay where I can see you and touch you and know you’re okay. Promise me you’ll stay.”

She’s so intense that I hesitate. It reminds me so strongly of Peter begging me to stay. But he’s not real, and Mom is. “I’ll stay with you.”

She relaxes, either not noticing or not caring how I phrased my promise. I don’t even know why I said it that way. I can’t go back to a place that doesn’t exist.

“I’d wanted to be an actress,” Mom says.

I turn my head to look at her. She was always mocking the wannabe celebrities that clog Los Angeles, the bottle blondes and the overbuilt pretty boys. “You?”

“You asked what you don’t know about me. In fifth grade, I was certain that I was going to be an actress. We had a school play, and I was cast as Mrs. Rabbit. I still remember the song, ‘Oh, I am Mrs. Rabbit and I say hello to you...’ And then two years later, I auditioned for the town community theater and won the part of the White Rabbit. I was destined to play rabbits. I couldn’t see that as my future. So I gave it up before I could ever be the Velveteen Rabbit, Peter Rabbit, or... I can’t think of any others.”

“Rabbit from A.A. Milne.”

“Yes.”

“Harvey, the six-foot invisible rabbit. I think that was a movie.”

“With Jimmy Stewart. Black-and-white. I remember it.”

“Br’er Rabbit. Bugs Bunny. Uncle Wiggily. Thumper. Thumper’s girlfriend. Edward Tulane. Bunnicula.”

“See, I had a whole career ahead of me that I simply abandoned because I didn’t have the imagination to think of what could be. On the other hand, I suppose all the hopping would have been hard on my knees.”

“Probably,” I say. “But good exercise.”